Hey, folks! We gotta run; Wednesday is my "too many meetings" day, and I know Sam, Puf, and Peter had to run off to other meetings as well. Thanks to everybody who asked us questions! Always good to see such enthusiasm from the Firebase community, and hopefully we can do this again sometime...

Well, these days, any Analytics project you hook up to Firebase is really a GA "App + Web Property" underneath the hood, so if the answer you're looking for isn't in the Firebase dashboard, I might recommend heading on over to the GA site and seeing if it's there. There's a number of reports that are exclusively available on GA, so you might be able to find what you're looking for. The team did a pretty nice video about this recently. And also, the whole GA thing with Firebase is so confusing. There are so many GAs now. As it so happens, I wrote a blog post all about this ! (Sorry it's not on hashnode)

The product teams don't like it when we spoil too much for them, so I have to be somewhat vague here. In addition to the items Sam mentioned above, I'll also add that the Remote Config team is looking to add a number of quality-of-life improvements to make sure your RC setup is easier to manage when your project gets larger and more complicated. I'll also add that there should be some nice improvements coming to Performance Monitoring, too, so you should considering adding that into your app if you haven't yet.

Yeah, when I started at Google, I had come from a game design background and hadn't written a line of production-level code in years. So it was kinda intimidating to be grouped in with a bunch of engineers who knew what they were doing. :) I think what helped me was that I eventually came to the realization that when people seem to know more about you, it's usually not that they're significantly smarter than you, it simply comes down to the fact that they just have spent more time with a certain technology than you have. In terms of practical advice, there's a lot of videos, books, TED talks, etc. about establishing a growth mindset. I might take a look at one of those, because I think that can really be helpful. (In fact, if any of you have good recommendations there, add 'em to this thread.)

That's kinda hard to say without knowing a little more about the searches you're performing, but I will say: If you're performing frequent searches, expect to have frequent document reads. That's just going to be a fact of life Consider adding limits to your queries and paginating your results -- make sure your client isn't retrieving more records than your users actually need. This can be especially important when the size of your collections grow. I'm assuming you're asking because of cost, and my general advice here is to beware prematurely optimizing for price. I've seen a lot of really gnarly code on StackOverflow where developers have spent hours creating unstable solutions that are really hard to debug in order to save, like, 10 cents a day. Obviously, you want to avoid doing really bad things like reading in an entire collection when you don't need to, but remember that your time costs money too!

Oh, you probably wanted more info, didn't you? Okay… no, I think there will be situations where RTDB will always be a better solution. The Realtime Database is optimized for situations where you want small chunks of data that's updated frequently (perhaps to power a poker game or something), where as Cloud Firestore is optimized for larger chunks of data that are updated less frequently. (Like, say, a blog post.) I'm not sure if there will ever be a day where one database can serve both or your needs, and we have lots of customers happily using each one of them, so I think we're happy to continue running two NoSQL databases for the foreseeable future.

Nope.

The short answer is that, underneath the hood, Firebase IS a GCP product. When you create a Firebase project, Firebase creates a GCP project for you behind the scenes. So services like Cloud Firestore and Cloud Storage are powered by those same corresponding cloud products -- there really isn't a difference between them. And so if you wanted to go ahead and add in some other GCP services to that project, you can go ahead and do that. That said, Firebase provides some additional easy-to-use client libraries to access these, along with access to other services that aren't really part of Google Cloud like Crashlytics, Remote Config, and GA.

Right now, probably your best option is to export your data into BigQuery and then import it from there into a tool like Looker, Tableau, or Data Studio. That said, I know the GA team is working on some ways to more easily get at your data programmatically so there might be some more clever solutions you'll be able to build in the future.